The Now-And-Then Detective

by William Wells

  The cost of repairing the roof was eighteen thousand bucks. I knew the roofer, no need to get a second opinion. When it came to the bar, Bill had his agenda and I had mine, which was to earn some cash, keep myself busy between homicide cases, and, perhaps, as a recovering alcoholic, prove to myself that I had the will power to drink diet root beer in a bar. Think former bank robber owns a bank. So far, I had the will power, but the recovery rule was one day at a time. In addition, I always enjoyed the warm conviviality of bars, and still did, even without the alcoholic haze.

  You can’t change the past or be certain about the future. Today is the only canvas on which to paint the portrait of your life. Brother Timothy at Loyola told us that. He was one of the good clerics. He thought hard about resigning from the priesthood when the sexual abuse scandal first broke, he told me, but decided to stay within the church and try to persuade any abusers he came across that they needed to see the error of their ways. He said that, as a seminarian, he’d heard rumors about the abuse, and would forever wish he’d followed up on them, but the internal culture was don’t ask, don’t tell. So who was he to judge others? He’d been a professional boxer before becoming a priest, a ranked middleweight, so I knew he could be very persuasive. Let’s just say that my friends and I were never late for class when we were his students. And maybe an abuser or two finally, at Brother Timothy’s urging, did get true religion.

  Father Benson Hargrove was the priest of Trinity-by-the-Cove Episcopal Church on Galleon Drive in Port Royal. You could walk there from the Wilberforce house, which, I learned, Henry often did. It was the only church in the neighborhood, and was built by John Glen Sample, the Port Royal developer.

  We were seated in comfortable leather club chairs near a stained-glass window in Father Hargrove’s study. The pattern in the stained-glass window depicted Christ on the Cross. Father Hargrove had been preparing his Sunday sermon when I arrived, he told me. Perhaps the topic was “Maybe a Camel Can Pass Through the Eye of a Needle.” Jesus said it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. As I observed during my first Naples murder investigation, if Jesus was right, then why should the residents of Port Royal contribute to the church’s building fund and stuff the collection plate with big bucks if it wasn’t going to gain them entry to the heavenly kingdom? It was Father Hargrove’s job to reassure his flock that their generosity provided a loophole. By that measure, when they got to heaven, they’d find Henry Wilberforce there.

  Hanging on the wall near Father Hargrove’s desk were diplomas from Dartmouth College and the Yale Divinity School. Ivy League all the way. I’d always imagined that the Episcopal Church was for the white-collar class. Nothing wrong with that, except for that eye-of-the-needle problem.

  “We had a very nice memorial service for Henry before he was flown home to Lake Forest,” Father Hargrove told me. “He was a fine man and a real friend of the church.”

  “I’ve heard he had good days and bad days, mentally speaking,” I said.

  “That’s true. In that regard, he was no different from a great many of our parishioners. Except that no one else ever came to Sunday services wearing a Chicago Cubs uniform.”

  Marisa had told me that, because of the advanced age of many Naples residents, there were as many churches in Naples as golf courses, filled with sinners seeking last-minute absolution.

  “What about money?” I asked. “I’ve heard that Henry was quite a philanthropist.”

  “He was very generous with his tithes,” Father Hargrove said. “He knew that our church needed a new roof, that the furnace was about to give up the ghost, and that the plumbing had to have its lead pipes replaced by copper. He asked me what all that would cost. The next Sunday, he put a check for the full amount in the collection plate.”

  I wished that Henry had walked into The Drunken Parrot after the hurricane: Drinks on the house, my good man, and let me tell you about our roof problem.

  “Are there many home invasions in Port Royal?” I asked, playing along with the cover story.

  “No, thankfully, there are not. The Naples Police Department is very good about patrolling the streets, and the Port Royal Neighborhood Watch program is very active.”

  The housekeeper reappeared with coffee and pastries. Bless her heart. She’d have no trouble passing through the eye of the needle.

  Father Hargrove winked and said. “Don’t quote me on this, Detective Starkey, but it’s such a shame that the burglar chose Henry’s house. Just between you, me, and the Virgin Mary, not all Port Royal residents are as generous as he was.”

  The bad guy had killed the reverend’s golden goose.

  Next on my interview list was Leila Purcell, chairwoman of the board of the Miriam Wilberforce Art Museum. I read on the museum’s website that it had been called the Naples Museum of Art until a year ago, when Henry donated a number of paintings from his personal art collection, including works by Picasso, Matisse, Rembrandt, Gustav Klimt, and Edward Hopper.

  I wasn’t an art expert, but Claire was into that stuff, sometimes dragging me to museums and lectures in Chicago, so I recognized the names of the artists of the paintings Henry had donated to the museum, and I was certain that they were worth megabucks. My trade-off for going to the museums and lectures with Claire was that she would go to Cubs games with me, followed by drinks at The Baby Doll Polka Lounge. Actually, I think she kind of liked doing that, although she never admitted it.

  At Leila’s suggestion, I met her for lunch at Olde Naples Country Club. It was, as Yogi Berra said, “Déjà vu all over again.” Which was also the title of John Fogerty’s sixth solo studio album. I dined at Olde Naples CC during my first Naples murder case with a fine woman named Ashley Howe who was instrumental in helping me solve the murders.

  Leila Purcell was of an age when pretty women were called “handsome.” She had short, stylishly cut silver hair, and was wearing a white pants suit with pink trim and a pearl necklace with matching earrings. I again was wearing my preppie uniform. For all anyone knew, I’d graduated from Yale and the Harvard Business School instead of from Loyola and the Chicago Police Academy. Until, perhaps, I spoke.

  When I arrived, Leila was seated at a table near the windows overlooking the golf course, sipping a glass of white wine. Back in my drinking days, the only wine I consumed was Cold Duck. I once told Marisa that and she was genuinely horrified.

  Leila put her purse from the table onto one of the unoccupied chairs as I sat opposite her, shook her head, and said, “Kate Spade. Such a shame.”

  I had no idea who she was talking about, but I didn’t ask so as to hide my ignorance. Was a woman named Kate Spade supposed to join us, but something had prevented her from doing so?

  “Thank you for seeing me,” I told Leila as a white-jacketed waiter brought the menus and took our drink orders, an Arnie Palmer for me and another white wine for her.

  “Henry Wilberforce was a saint,” she said. “Whoever killed him should be castrated.”

  An observation that made me like her a lot.

  “I assume you don’t know why a burglar would target his house,” I said, again sticking to the Naples PD party line.

  “No idea whatsoever,” she answered.

  I knew she didn’t, of course. but I was trying, with these interviews, to get a sense of Henry Wilberforce the man, and to see where that led, if anywhere. Why did a man who, everyone said, had no enemies, have at least one?

  “What were the circumstances of Henry’s gift of those paintings to the museum?” I asked Leila.

  “No different from other gifts we’ve received, I’d say.”

  “I mean, was he … lucid?”

  “Define lucid,” she said.

  “Did Henry fully understand the magnitude of his gift, would you say?”

  “One afternoon Henry was in the museum,” Leila said. “He asked a docent if I was there. I knew Henry and Miriam well, you see. I wasn’t there, but the do
cent, a woman named Tamara Cox, not that it matters what her name was, called me at home, and I came right over. I found Henry in the Modern Art Gallery, looking at an Andy Warhol. I forget which one, but that doesn’t matter either, does it? It might have been his painting of a Campbell’s tomato soup can, or the one of Marilyn Monroe, which is my favorite—not, as I said, that it matters to your investigation. Henry asked me if I thought that the Warhol painting, whichever one it was, was worthy of hanging in the museum. I said, yes, I did. He said he really didn’t much like modern art, and that he had a few paintings he thought the museum might want. A few days later, I got a call from his lawyer in Lake Forest, whose name I can’t recall at the moment, not that it matters, and, a week later, it was a Tuesday, I think, or maybe a Wednesday, whichever, a truck arrived at the museum with the paintings, which had been in his Lake Forest home. Or maybe his home was in Lake Bluff, not that …”

  “What is the value of the paintings?” I asked her, cutting her off in mid not that.

  “Priceless, I’d say.”

  “Did you talk with him about anything else at the museum that day?” I asked her.

  She said: “Oh, just idle chitchat. He was wearing a Civil War uniform, Union Army, I think it was, not that it matters which side of the war his uniform represented. It was blue, so Union Army, now that I think of it. An officer’s uniform, I think, although I don’t recall which rank, not that I’d know a lieutenant from a general. My late husband, Chester, was a colonel in the army when he retired, so if Henry was a colonel, I might have recognized that insignia. Not that it matters, as I said. Fortunately, we didn’t have to live on Chester’s army pay because my parents were quite wealthy, you see. But of course you don’t care about that, Detective Starkey. Anyway, Henry sometimes wore all sorts of costumes, I don’t recall what other kinds at the moment, but that’s of no consequence to our discussion, so I didn’t find the fact that he was dressed that way to be unusual or worth mentioning to him.”

  Leila’s manner of discourse gave new meaning to the word rambling. I never knew where an interview was going to lead, but the odds were that this one was leading me to slit my wrists with a butter knife. Or hers.

  The waiter returned and we gave him our lunch orders. We talked more about what a fine man Henry was, a conversation laced with Leila’s many digressions. When lunch was finished, I thanked her for her time and offered to pay the check, knowing that I’d be reimbursed by the Naples PD. She looked at me as if trying to understand what I meant, and then said, “Oh, no, that won’t be necessary. Guests aren’t allowed to pay for anything at the club.”

  Well, excuuuuse me.

  Driving home, I thought: Here was another example of Henry Wilberforce behaving oddly and giving away lots of money and expensive gifts, in an apparently unplanned way. Maybe that had something to do with his murder, and maybe it did not. My investigation was still in the “maybe” stage. Sometimes, investigations remained there in perpetuity.

  It went like that with other beneficiaries of Henry Wilberforce’s largesse: the head of the local humane society, which now could afford to be a no-kill shelter; the Naples Players, an amateur theater company, moving to a new, larger building; the Boys and Girls Club, which could now offer the kids hot meals after school; the Naples Municipal Golf Course, which now gave free lessons to junior players; the Naples Public Library, which now had Henry’s collection of first-edition classics. And more.

  Henry was missed, everyone said. No one had any idea about why his house was targeted by a homicidal burglar. If Henry turned down the wrong person looking for a handout, a person with a screw loose, that could be a motive for his murder. It would have to be someone capable of murder, and highly skilled. Not many people were both. Whenever you came across people like that, you locked them up.

  TOM SULLIVAN had given me the name of Henry’s lawyer in Lake Forest. Having learned all I could in Naples, I needed to call him to make an appointment to meet with him. I went to The Drunken Parrot, had a burger while sitting at the bar, then made myself comfortable in my favorite booth and called the lawyer, Brandon Taylor. When he answered, I introduced myself and told him that I was investigating the murder of his client.

  “I already spoke with another Naples detective,” Taylor said. “But I’m happy to speak with you as well.”

  He agreed to see me in his office the next day.

  6.

  My Kind of Town

  I sold my Wrigleyville duplex when I moved to Florida. Renting the duplex’s second apartment had provided a nice income to supplement my detective’s salary and the money I got from Bill Stevens’s books. Whenever a tenant couldn’t pay the rent, I let it slide. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. However, when one tenant was eight months behind in his rent, and didn’t seem inclined to ever pay up, even though it was clear he had the cash because he bought a new Camaro, I was forced to do unto him what I wouldn’t want to have done unto me. When he moved in, he didn’t know I was a cop. When he moved out, he did.

  Some of my colleagues on the police force didn’t need an additional income because one of the benefits of police work in Chicago included the availability of payoffs to look the other way. I had many opportunities for that, but my family upbringing and Jesuit education prevented me from even considering it. However, I did commit sins of omission by not ratting out the crooked cops. I stayed in touch with Brother Timothy after I graduated from Loyola. When I talked to him about the situation, he said he understood that by reporting the corruption, I would compromise my effectiveness as a police officer, and might even “accidentally” get shot by another policeman during a gunfight or have a call for help go unanswered. It had happened. “Life is a balancing act,” Brother Timothy told me. “You do your best to not fall on your ass.”

  Bill Stevens had a guest room in the apartment building he owned that I used whenever in town. I kept a toothbrush there. I flew from Fort Myers airport to O’Hare on a Thursday morning: a sunny eighty-four degrees when I left, an overcast twenty-nine degrees, snow on the ground, when I arrived. I took a brown leather bomber jacket from my overnight bag and slipped it on before exiting the terminal. The Hawk, which is what jazz singer Lou Rawls called the frigid wind blowing in off Lake Michigan, hit me head on. I didn’t mind. Perfect weather can get boring. A little adversity adds spice to the stew.

  Speaking of stew, it was lunchtime, so I took a taxi to The Baby Doll Polka Lounge. You couldn’t get an authentic Italian beef sandwich with sweet peppers, dipped in savory beef juice, in Fort Myers Beach. My short-order cook at The Drunken Parrot, a woman named Alice Radinsky, who was a former Marine Corps mess sergeant, gave up when I kept rejecting her attempts to duplicate the sandwich, so it wasn’t on our menu. When I inadvertently made a sour face when biting into her latest attempt, she said, “Well then fuck it and the horse it rode in on.” I didn’t think “it” meant the sandwich.

  The Baby Doll was a neighborhood joint in the best sense of that word, a hangout for cops, firemen, pols, print journalists, and whoever else the wind blew in. Too low-rent for the broadcast people who preferred to dine on white tablecloths in places where they’d be recognized and fawned over. Once a guy with luck as bad as it got tried to stick up The Baby Doll. He might as well have tried to rob the police department’s shooting range.

  “Well, as I live and breathe, it’s Jack Starkey,” Lucille, the veteran bartender, said as I arrived. “I was beginning to think it was something I said.”

  I slid onto a barstool and said, “I moved to Florida five years ago, Lucille.”

  “Huh,” she said. “I only recently noticed your absence. Your usual still your usual?”

  “Good to see you too, Lucille. Yeah, my usual.”

  She served me a mug of Berghoff diet root beer, another Chicago specialty which they had on tap, and shouted toward the kitchen door, “One beef, wet, with sweet peppers, no onions, and put wheels on it!”

>   No need for an intercom at The Baby Doll.

  As I waited for my food, I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Dominick Bevilaqua, a detective in the vice unit. He’d always been teased about his last name because it was the same as one of the hoods in The Sopranos TV series.

  “You’re under arrest for exposing yourself on the L,” Dom told me. “The security cameras couldn’t see your face, but your little limp dick was clearly visible. A dead giveaway.”

  I said, “Hey, Dom, buy you a beer?”

  “Does Oprah like shrimp and grits?” he said as he took the stool next to mine.

  Dom had been through the department’s required sensitivity training course and flunked it.

  Lucille spotted him, drew a frosty mug of Goose Island Pilsner, a beer that was made not five miles from where we were sitting, and slid it down the bar top to him without spilling any. When it came to tending bar, Lucille had mad skills.

  “You still living down in the tropics, Jack?” he asked me.

  “Fort Myers Beach, in Florida,” I answered as my sandwich arrived. Dom stared at it, so I asked Lucille for a knife and another plate and gave him half.

  “Whataya doin’ these days?” he asked as he took a bite of the sandwich. The juice dripped down his chin and onto his tie, just like it’s supposed to.

  “I own a bar,” I answered.

  “Ironic, isn’t it? For a …”

  “Recovering alcoholic. I make it work.”

  “We’re havin’ a retirement party here tomorrow night for Johnny McBride,” he told me. “You oughta come and see everyone.”

  “I will if I can, Dom,” I said. “That’d be nice.”

  I knew I wouldn’t because there was nothing more boring than hearing inebriated cops tell war stories. I used to do plenty of that during my drinking days. Dom and I chatted a while longer, and I greeted other old pals who came in. Then I picked up my overnight bag and caught the L to Wrigleyville, smiling at the security cameras and pointing at my crotch for Dom’s benefit.